Archive for February, 2007

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Geeky Valentine’s cards

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I was surprised to see that my sister Andrea’s blog featured some greeting card copy I wrote way back in 1993 for VooDoo, MIT’s humor magazine. (My all-time favorite VooDoo headline, not yet online, is “MIT Pistol Team Beats Yale Fencing Team”.) My premise was that the cards offered in the campus bookstore did not meet the needs of MIT students (such as “sorry about your wrists”) and suggested some more relevant cards. Here’s a teaser:

I have enjoyed our electronic correspondence

Whenever my terminal notifies me that I have mail,
I eagerly check whether it is from you.
If it is, my heart races as I read and reread it.
It annoys me officemates that
I laugh aloud at your witticisms
and audibly groan at your criticisms,
But I care about you more than them.
I fondly remember the times we used “talk”.
I confess that I saved away phrases of yours
that I was unwilling to let go.
I think we should meet each other in person some time.

I also slipped in some feminism:

You don’t belong at MIT (to most students)

I don’t know anything about your intelligence,
your grades, or your experience,
but that won’t stop me from telling you
that you don’t belong at MIT.
You were only admitted because you are
a legacy/woman/underrepresented minority/Iowan.
I realize that by saying this without knowing
anything about your abilities,
I imply that no member of your group is qualified,
but I say it anyway.

Posted in Sex & gender, True confessions | No Comments »

How do we love being geeks? Let us count the ways.

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

SSAG photo contestA few days ago I vented about a pin-up calendar featuring a bunch of female engineering students in the near-nude. But everyone’s a critic, right? How does one put forward a different image of women in science, engineering and other geeky areas beyond the hoary misguided stereotype of unattractive, unnatural misfit?

One way, of course, is to collect a couple dozen essays from women about their experiences being women in male-dominated fields that address topics from life in the lab or cubicle to talking about fashion and sex. And if you’ve been reading this blog for the last month or so, you’ll know that I won’t miss any opportunity to plug our book.

But for those of you who might prefer a more homeopathic remedy, there’s also another opportunity for geek women to stand up and be counted in images—and yes, you can keep your clothes on. (Please!) The new online science magazine Inkling has launched a contest in search of the photo which best suits the caption “OMG she’s such a geek!” It runs until the end of the month—read the rules to get all the details about where to send and info on the Ada Lovelace poster prize.

Full disclosure: I’ve written a few pieces for Inkling, which aspires to tell science stories with a touch more whimsy than they are often reported. In the words of co-editors Anne Casselman and Anna Gosline: “Founded in late 2006, we cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods. We aim to capture a larger proportion of female readers, but, of course, everyone is always welcome.”

Check Inkling out—you’ll probably learn something and have a chuckle at the same time. And if you think you can make a winning photo of female geekitude, have at it. I’ve set the bar pretty low here just wearing my Hello Kitty t-shirt—I know you can do better. There’s gotta be someone out there mired in cable spaghetti or doing cartwheels in the cavern of an accelerator!

Posted in Accolades, Games and play, Sex & gender | 3 Comments »

3-D Sex and the Computer Scientist

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

Last month, I was approached by a woman considering going back to school in computer science, which I teach at Mills College. We met, and I encouraged her, lending her some Java training materials. I received this email from her today:

On the 15th I will drop off at your office the Java 2 Training Course. I will not be using it after all, but thank you very much, just the same.

After receiving the results of an aptitude test last week I realized CS would not be the best field for me to enter. A key aptitude among engineers is being able to visualize 3-D structures. I scored on the low end of average with this aptitude.

After getting over my surprise, I replied:

I can’t visualize 3-D structures either. Please do not make important career decisions based on a single aptitude test that is likely to be faulty. For example, there could be gender bias. Women are reportedly less able to visualize 3-D structures then men are, but some of us flatlanders are excellent computer scientists.

You shouldn’t abandon CS unless you are not interested in it or you fail in learning it. Please do not leave the field because of some possibly sexist superstitions about what abilities are needed.

I am reminded of Michael Bérubé’s satire on former Harvard president Larry Summer’s statements about women in science:

According to [Harvard geneticist Charles] Kinbote, the presidency of Harvard University requires a unique array of talents and dispositions which, statistically, only a small handful of women possess…..Men are … more adept than women at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes on aptitude tests, Kinbote added. “You’d be surprised how often a university president needs to do this, and at Harvard the pressure is especially intense.” Kinbote estimated that the president of Harvard spends roughly one-quarter of the working day mentally rotating complex, hypothetical three-dimensional shapes.

Much is being made of Harvard’s recent decision to appoint a woman to its presidency. While some people are speculating that she was hired because of her sex, it is more likely that she is the first Harvard president not appointed on the basis of their sex.

On a similar theme, see Women, men, and IQ tests, posted at my Beyond Satire blog.

Posted in Career advice, Sex & gender, Tech talk, They actually said that? | 5 Comments »

Girl Scouts teach technophilia

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I was a very happy Girl Scout when I was a kid. I wasn’t so into the Girl Scout meetings with the sewing and singing, but I loved Girl Scout camp. That’s where I met lots of interesting girls, rode horses, hiked mountains, learned to cook potatoes in a pit of coals, and discovered the joy of lanyards. So I was pretty excited when geek extraordinaire Jennifer Crakow emailed me about how the Girl Scouts have started after-school programs to inspire young women to become interested in technology. In these programs, called the EDGE, girls as young as five learn to use computers for art and science projects.
The Daily Texan reports:

Savita Raj, a technology specialist for the Girl Scouts and unofficial director of The EDGE, calls this program the first of its kind.

“We’re focused on empowering girls to become more comfortable to be able to take those kinds of electives in school, to make the choices to go that career route,” she says. “It’s all about getting girls comfortable with technology.”

According to Raj, most young girls between the ages of 8 and 17 tend to shy away from technology-oriented studies, particularly in classes with both boys and girls. She hopes that the EDGE program, which is meant to be an after-school, girls-only gathering, will help eliminate the discomfort or intimidation that may prevent girls from becoming adept at technology.

Nineteen counties and roughly 14,000 girls participate in The EDGE program, and the numbers continue to grow, Raj said. This program is an indication of a new route the Girl Scouts organization is taking, one that is less traditional and more progressive, using today’s fascination with technology to teach girls more about that field.

“The Girl Scouts is a wonderful tradition, but it needs to reinvent itself in so many centuries,” Raj said, laughing. “There’s a huge array in what Girl Scouts can do, you know. It’s not just cookies and camping . . .

In addition to The EDGE program, the Girl Scouts also hold such events as a Lego robotics camp and an architecture camp for young participants.

Not Your Mother’s Girl Scouts [via The Daily Texan]

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

If only I’d known this when I was 18

Monday, February 12th, 2007

Gals, I know y’all can do physics if you’re bound and determined—I did it for a while, without being a genius. But as I know I’ve mentioned before, you need to ask yourself why you would want to. Sure, making it as a tenured professor sounds great, but so does winning the lottery. You can’t realistically count on either outcome happening.

This experimental condensed matter physicist blogger is telling it like it really is:

This is also why I am so disgusted with certain attitudes in hiring new faculty or new staff members (if we are talking about the parallel universe of national labs). The attitude is basically – we created a situation when there are hundreds of candidates desperately applying for every position available, and because we can afford to be so selective, we can scoop the best of the best of the best, invite them for a song-and-dance presentation (”Impress me!” approach), and treat the rest of applicants who didn’t make the shortlist cut as garbage not worthy [of] our attention. The arbitrary nature of [the] selection process never ceases to amaze me, even though it’s remarkable how programs that are not even nationally ranked can attract people with stellar research records (as far as I am concerned) in hope that they may get desperate enough to accept a position that utilizes those skills in a very marginal fashion, if at all. It’s as if classically trained opera singers were hired to sing catchy commercial tunes at a supermarket to attract more customers for minimum wage pay.

Therefore, I find it somewhat disingenuous when people start talking about how to encourage certain underrepresented groups [to] enter graduate schools in sciences. We should encourage interest in science, but should we encourage more bright and talented people to follow the career path that has 95% chance of leading nowhere (after 6-7 years of living on Raman noodles through grad school and relocating a few times for a couple of 3 year postdoc stints that quickly become the norm)? I am not so sure…

Neither am I. Plus female job candidates have to deal with the swirl of biases out there that stay alive amid entrenched faculty (just check out FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog if you want a taste).

Posted in Career advice | No Comments »

Joy of Science begins over at Thus Spake Zuska

Monday, February 12th, 2007

She’s Such a Geek! contributor Suzanne Franks is starting her course “Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science over at her blog, Thus Spake Zuska. Today she posted her synopses of the first week’s readings as well as some other notes, all of which is open for discussion in the comments.

All of this is well worth reading, especially if you’ve ever thought that not fitting in with the dominant culture in a technical field reflected some flaw in you. (It took me a long time to forgive myself for my failing to fit in in physics, but now I know that I’d been brainwashed to be a science worshiper.) Remember, science is not perfect; it has a culture, too, and like all cultures, it has its flaws.

Here’s a taste of what Zuska writes here about women in engineering (WIE) programs, whose value is being debated since women still make up less than 20% of engineering majors, even after nearly thirty years of programs encouraging women to go into these careers:

So are WIE programs a waste of time and resources? I don’t think so, for the following reasons. If a college of engineering is going to do little or nothing to change business as usual, then a WIE program provides a safe haven for the women who do manage to slog it out in the Boy’s Club. They need a place to go once in awhile to get advice on moron management, you know. WIE programs can help reinforce the belief that it’s not abnormal for a woman to love technology. They can also help women see that one need not be completely obsessed with technology to be a “real” engineer. In this case, WIE programs are truly there just to help women deal with the status quo….

I’ve always said that women don’t need programs to help them deal with engineering; they are perfectly capable of doing engineering. Engineering needs programs to help it become more inclusive.

Posted in Progress and politics, Sex & gender, Zuska, Zuska, Zuska! | No Comments »

Cheesecake calendars are so cliche

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

So over at Rants of a feminist engineer I just read about a “Girls of Engineering” cheesecake calendar depicting several women enrolled in the engineering school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Supposedly the makers of the calendar wanted to convey the notion that women in engineering don’t just study all the time.

Well, no duh. We know that women in engineering, and female geeks of all stripes, don’t just geek out all the time. People all have their needs for love, intimacy, and sex, regardless of what they choose to do for a career.

But I also don’t think that posing in lingerie in front of a camera is the best way to communicate the message that women can be multidimensional. Instead, it just replaces the stereotype of the geeky woman with the stereotype of the woman who is there for men’s sexual pleasure. I doubt that anyone who buys this calendar is going to be reading the information on the women’s majors. That’s probably written in much smaller print than those images of skin and lingerie splashed across the page.

Hey, I’m sure the modeling sessions were fun, and it’s people’s right to pose for a cheesecake calendar if they want to. But aren’t “tongue-in-cheek” pin-up calendars way overdone, anyway? And if people really want to see how female geekery and sex mix, the written word can put a far more nuanced point on the matter anyway—as SSAG contributors Violet Blue, Suzanne Franks, and Quinn Norton do in their essays!

UPDATE: Zuska just wrote about this calendar, too—and reminded me that there have been others like it just within the past year. People, how about a different calendar that tries to show how original and creative y’all can be, for a change? This pinup stuff really is sooooo boring on top of all the other things wrong with it!

Posted in Sex & gender, Zuska, Zuska, Zuska! | 4 Comments »

It’s not all right to cry

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

I found a great post and discussion on crying in the scientific workplace at A Natural Scientist via another fine blog, Am I a woman scientist? Jenny F. Scientist describes the double bind of being socialized as a girl that it’s all right to cry, but that in the science lab, don’t even think about it.

Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.

(more…)

Posted in Career advice, Progress and politics, Sex & gender, True confessions | 2 Comments »

Is Drew a sop?

Saturday, February 10th, 2007

Everybody, both right-wing nutbars and left-wing zealots, seems to have decided that Harvard named its first woman president to mollify people who were offended by Larry Summers’ sexist remarks two years ago. Says the National Organization of Women:

NOW is so pleased that Harvard will finally have a female president — and it has only taken them 371 years. Larry Summers, we couldn’t have done it without you.

And now here’s one of her critics, who actually wrote a whole book about the “struggle for the soul of” Harvard and convinced a major publisher to publish it, quoted in the New York Times:

“The real import of this choice is that it is a cautious pick, which seems targeted at healing the wounds of the Summers years and restoring Harvard’s momentum as quickly as possible,” said Richard Bradley, who wrote “Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University” (HarperCollins, 2005).

I know absolutely nothing about Professor Drew Gilpin Faust, except that she has a cool name and she’s a respected Civil War historian. Some of her comments about celebrating people from that era, but not uncritically, have already been taken out of context by nutbars. Does Dr. Faust have the ability to run a major university? No clue.

But let’s just say everybody’s right and Harvard is making this Faustian bargain to get past the Summers controversy. If that’s the case, then aren’t they sort of barking up the wrong branch? Shouldn’t they be, I dunno, hiring more women science professors and giving them tenure? Giving women more fellowships and opportunities to present their work? Encouraging both men and women to mentor talented female grad students? Has Harvard made any substantive progress in those areas since Summers?

Posted in Progress and politics | 4 Comments »

Apply now: Early Career Award!

Friday, February 9th, 2007

Women who are making contributions to the field of computing, and to improving opportunities for other women, often don’t get the recognition they deserve. Especially if they’re less than a decade into their career. That’s why it’s amazingly cool that the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research sponsors the Anita Borg Early Career Award:

The annual award will be given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women. This award recognizes work in areas of academia and industrial research labs that has had a positive and significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community and is targeted at women that are relatively early in their careers (no more than 10 years past the Ph.D.).

The application deadline for this year’s award is Feb. 15, and the award will be announced May 15. Get writing! (Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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